diff options
author | Jon Dowland <jon@ra.ncl.ac.uk> | 2009-07-21 11:44:52 +0100 |
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committer | Jon Dowland <jon@ra.ncl.ac.uk> | 2009-07-21 11:44:52 +0100 |
commit | ddd55037d4662ec7f0d9e4f5643069d2592db6e2 (patch) | |
tree | e59bbf044c9240da37082e791573274120429621 /doc/plugins/comments | |
parent | 7532eff2b7a929de62e470a430d09d9c4a7d6b88 (diff) |
some thoughts in the wake of a spam attack
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/plugins/comments')
-rw-r--r-- | doc/plugins/comments/discussion.mdwn | 27 |
1 files changed, 27 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/plugins/comments/discussion.mdwn b/doc/plugins/comments/discussion.mdwn index 3d7452b9a..396d1f6d4 100644 --- a/doc/plugins/comments/discussion.mdwn +++ b/doc/plugins/comments/discussion.mdwn @@ -161,3 +161,30 @@ Raw HTML was not initially allowed by default (this was configurable). >>> all directives will contine to be inexpensive and safe enough that it's >>> sensible to allow users to (ab)use them on open wikis. >>> --[[Joey]] + +---- + +I have a test ikiwiki setup somewhere to investigate adopting the comments +plugin. It is setup with no auth enabled and I got hammered with a spam attack +over the last weekend (predictably). What surprised me was the scale of the +attack: ikiwiki eventually triggered OOM and brought the box down. When I got +it back up, I checked out a copy of the underlying git repository, and it +measured 280M in size after being packed. Of that, about 300K was data prior +to the spam attack, so the rest was entirely spam text, compressed via git's +efficient delta compression. + +I had two thoughts about possible improvements to the comments plugin in the +wake of this: + + * comment pagination - there is a hard-to-define upper limit on the number + of comments that can be appended to a wiki page whilst the page remains + legible. It would be useful if comments could be paginated into sub-pages. + + * crude flood control - asides from spam attacks (and I am aware of + [[plugins/blogspam]]), people can crap flood or just aggressively flame + repeatedly. An interesting prevention measure might be to not let an IP + post more than 3 sequential comments to a page, or to the site, without + at least one other comment being interleaved. I say 3 rather than 2 since + correction follow-ups are common. + +-- [[Jon]] |